Duplicity (11 page)

When he spoke, his voice was thin, as if he thought she were so
fragile, even his breath could break her. “I know something really shitty
caused you to be this way—playing off fictional life because you don’t want to
face your real life. I don’t have to be a psych major to figure that out.”

Her head snapped up, and her eyes narrowed. “What
is
your
major?”

He grimaced.

“You
are
a psych major, aren’t you?” She huffed. “You want
to know what’s
shitty?
People who
treat me and my life like I’m some fucking sideshow.”
She got in his
face then, anger gaining on every other emotion. “That’s all this is, isn’t it?
You’re
the fucking liar.”

“Lilith—” He tried to reach for her.

“No.” She scrambled backward. “What you said about that girl?
Kassandra
?
That was all bullshit, wasn’t it? All those
questions .
 . .
you just get off on trying to get into my head. Well, trust
me,
you’ve gotten your money’s worth. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.”

“That’s not what—”

“Let me tell you something, Dr. Freud.” She was walking backward,
her arms around her shoulders. “The only person who’s made me feel like crap
lately is you.”

“Lilith—”

“Do not follow me.”

“Lilith!”

To his credit, though he called her name, asking, begging, her to
stop and listen to him, he didn’t follow her.

She wasn’t running, but she was walking fast, as if she could
outrun the tears that were stinging her eyes. Regret was a bastard of an
emotion. Regret was something you knew when someone had become ingrained,
become a piece of you, and as much as you wanted more than anything for it to
disappear, it was impossible. It was removing an arm. Even if she could tear
him out of the place he occupied in her heart and mind, he would be there—a
phantom ache all the worse because she could still feel the missing space.

How could she have been so stupid?

Here she’d let herself enjoy his company, played right into his
hands despite her better judgment. Every time she tried to pull away he would
dangle another carrot in front of her, and like an idiot, she kept coming back.
At least when she saw him during appointments she was giving nothing, but now
that she’d given her free time, he had too much of her.

How dare he? How dare he talk like he knew every damn thing about
her? Like he was so damn clever figuring out she was lying. He didn’t know
anything.

But what did he know, anyway? Maybe she lied to the likes of him,
but that didn’t mean she lived in fiction.

He was another asshole rich kid playing with his newest toy: his
expensive degree in mind-fucking. She was just one big experiment. For the life
of her, she couldn’t figure out how she’d ended up playing right into his game.

Over and over again she replayed the days they spent together,
recoiling when she touched upon a memory that made her ache. She was so lost in
her head, she didn’t realize how far or how long she’d been walking.

She didn’t hear the footfalls behind her on the otherwise empty
sidewalk.

She had forgotten the rest of the world existed before the
footfalls were right next to her and an arm came down around her shoulders,
pulling her tight up against a solid body.

Before she could scream, before she could react at all, there was
a voice in her ear, his words dripping with malevolence. “Hello, princess.”

Chapter 13

Voices faded in and out. Time existed in surreal lurches and
lulls. It was difficult to tell the difference between nightmare and reality when
consciousness was just as unpleasant as her chaotic dreamscape.

Lilith was in the hospital—she understood that much. Doctors and
nurses had been around, explaining why consciousness hurt. The police were
still milling about. Once, when she brushed consciousness, she recognized the
voice of one of the officers who’d questioned her.

“What’s your relationship to the victim?” he asked, and she heard
Mal’s
soft, sad tone when he answered.

At the word
victim
, some ingrained part of Lilith wanted to
sit up and argue. She loathed that word with an intense, fiery passion. She
hated the way it sounded and more importantly, hated the way it made her feel.

Victim
was the word
Mal’s
therapist had used
to explain why he’d been cutting the hell out of his upper arms. The physical
pain of the cuts was preferable to the emotional agony he was in. It had come
up again when Dana was in rehab, trying to get to the bottom of just what she
was using the drugs to escape.

Lilith wanted to rail against this word, it didn’t apply to her,
it couldn’t, but she didn’t have the energy. There were wet, ice cold blankets
laid one, two, three thick on her chest making it difficult to move or breathe,
let alone argue. Sleep beckoned, and Lilith followed.

But sleep was no respite. Her dreams misplaced her in space and
time, sending her back to relive the horrific night she’d had.

“Lilith. Honey, wake up. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Blinking awake again, it took a full two minutes for Lilith to
wrap her mind around reality. She was in a hospital bed struggling to breathe.
It was hard to breathe because her lung had collapsed. Her lung had collapsed
because she had three fractured ribs. She ached from head to toe because she
was covered in bruises.

Mal was holding her hand. Next to him, Dana was looking at her
with red-rimmed eyes.

Lilith sunk back against her pillow, wishing she could disappear.
She hated the expressions on her friends’ faces.
Pity.
She knew she had to look so pathetic. No one had given her a mirror yet, but
her face felt swollen and sore.

Shame crept like bile up her throat, and she looked away.

Frank’s accusations echoed in her head. She was in his territory,
his world, and she had no business being there. He’d seen her out with Oswald.

“I don’t know what you were trying to pull,” he’d snarled in her
ear. “Going out with Oswald like you’re not just some slut he’s fucking.”

He’d stuffed a fat roll of hundred dollar bills in her jeans right
before he’d tried to yank them off her, all the while snarling at her. He was
done playing her games. If she’d forgotten who she was, what she was, he was
going to remind her.

Right then, with her friends looking down at her battered body,
Lilith thought maybe he’d been right. Wasn’t this what she deserved? It had
been what Mal had been expecting for years. Wasn’t it just a matter of time
before she ended up just like this? Did she have any right to be surprised?

The indignant voice in her head was far away and waning. That
voice was the one part of her that knew this wasn’t her fault. There was no
excuse. There was nothing that justified what Frank had done to her, what he’d
tried to do. She’d made her unwillingness very clear, and he’d tried to take
what he wanted anyway.

“Is he dead?”
Her voice was a toneless
rasp, and she kept her head turned away from them.

“Who?”
Mal
asked.

Lilith closed her eyes, flinching when she remembered what it had
been like. She had self-defense training, but he’d gotten the upper hand. He
had her on her back, pinned by his massive body.

Part of her self-defense training
was knowing
when not to fight, when it was better to play the game and bide her time,
looking for an opening.

When it was clear she had no leverage, that he was hurting her
worse for all her struggling, she went limp beneath him, aching from the
beating he’d delivered while she was trying to get away. He yanked her shirt
open
—
the terrible rip of the fabric had to have been the worst
sound she’d ever heard in her life
—
and she bit the inside of her cheek
so hard, she tasted blood. It took every ounce of her self-control not to
writhe and wiggle and otherwise do everything she could to get away.

She waited.

“You better be a damn good lay,
girl.”He
grunted into her ear.

When his weight shifted, she struck. She twisted beneath him,
grabbing at the knife in her boot. She buried it deep in his gut, and when he
recoiled, screaming, she scrambled away. He was right behind her.

They’d struggled and tumbled down a set of stairs. That was how
her ribs had been fractured, and before unconsciousness took her, she’d noted
that Frank wasn’t moving.

Swallowing thickly—the inside of her mouth tasted like blood—she
tried again. “I stabbed him,” she whispered.
Lilith had no
idea how much trouble she was in. She had a vision of herself in prison orange
in a courtroom. Would it be a murder trial or just assault? Attempted murder?

She didn’t have the energy to care. It was a vague curiosity that
made her ask at all. She was resigned to her fate.

“No one tells us anything,” Dana said, sounding bitter. “They
won’t tell us what happened. Who did this, Lilith? Was his name Trey? And did
he .
 . . did he . . .”

“Dana,” Mal admonished.

Lilith turned her head.
“Trey?”
Hearing
his name made her want to retreat, but it also made her want to wake up. She
fought, trying to find words. Most of her vocabulary seemed to be cowering in
the corner somewhere.

Mal’s
lips tugged down at the corner. “You had a lot of nightmares. You said his name
when you were sleeping.
Many times.”

They weren’t nightmares because she hadn’t been asleep. She’d been
awake, but her thoughts weren’t quite concrete. More than once, she only
figured out she was talking out loud because someone, a nurse more often than
not, talked back or tried to comfort her.

It was possible she’d called for Trey when she wasn’t quite
conscious. When Frank was on top of her, her mind had tried to retreat for a
few seconds before she’d called it back. But for those brief seconds, she was
in Trey’s bedroom again, in his arms.

He was her safe and happy place.

And that was destroyed, too, wasn’t it.

Mal paused. “Is this the same Trey you were talking about at the
club that day?”

There was a fire in his eyes, and it took a moment for Lilith to
understand why.

“Oh.” She winced. Breathing was not fun. Breathing sharply was
agonizing. “
Trey
didn’t .
 . .
he isn’t . . .” She gave her head a little shake. “It wasn’t
him.”

Mal and Dana exchanged a surprised look.

“Is
he .
 . . do you want
me to call him?” Mal asked.

Lilith’s heart ached with a longing she couldn’t understand. She was
so tired.
So, so tired.
She had just enough energy to
shake her head. “You can’t call him,” she whispered, letting her eyelids droop.

She couldn’t see him now, not when she couldn’t pretend anymore.

“How about your dad, honey?”

Again, Lilith’s heart panged, and she remembered her father’s
comforting arms around her when she’d been a little, little girl waking from
nightmares.

“I don’t need him,” she murmured, turning her head away. “I don’t
need anyone.”

What she meant was she didn’t have anyone.

Shivering—she was cold right to the center of her bones—Lilith
hunkered down under the blankets and closed her eyes again.

~0~

The space in her head typically occupied by thoughts and stories
was blank.

Lilith was aware time was passing. She would answer the nurses and
doctors. When they gave her an instruction, she obeyed. She would acknowledge
Mal or Dana’s presence, but she hardly interacted with them.

She existed in an
anoetic
state. Some
unknown conglomerate of emotions was resting like a rock in her gut, but her
thoughts weren’t concrete enough to dissect.

The evening of the second day of her hospital stay, she woke
knowing she wasn’t alone. Some part of her felt bad. Mal and Dana had gotten
nothing but one-sided conversation from her for days, and yet they still kept
coming back.

“Lily-bean?”

At that, her eyelids shot open, and she turned so quickly, her
body was racked with pain. She gave a small cry, breathless.

“Oh, sweetheart.”
She
was aware her father was on his feet now, his hands hovering over her shoulders
as though he was too scared to even pat her for fear he would hurt her further.
“What happened? Should I get the nurse?”

“No. It’s okay.
I’m .
 . .”

She tried to say she was fine, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t. She
really wasn’t.

“What are you doing here?” she said when she found her voice
again.

Her father winced, sitting back down in the chair beside her.
“Malcolm called me.” He paused. “I would have been here in a heartbeat. I
don’t .
 . .” He swallowed hard, and it
occurred to Lilith he seemed close to tears.

“He shouldn’t have. I’m sorry he bothered you.” There was no
inflection in her voice at all. If she had the energy to feel anything, she
would have been annoyed. She’d told Mal over and over again she didn’t want him
to call her father.

Her father shrank back, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw
him bow his head. “Are things really that bad between us that you wouldn’t call
me when you’re hurt?” His tone was hardly more than a whisper—heavy with
sadness and tinged with defeat.

Lilith stared at the ceiling. “You don’t want to hear this.”

For long seconds, the only noise in the room was the dull roar of
a busy hospital in the background. Her father seemed to be struggling to steady
his breath.

“
I .
 . . several weeks ago
I ran into Mrs. Cooper.”

Lilith twitched in reaction to her name. What could Mal and Dana’s
mother have to do with anything?

“We got to talking. I knew she’d been having a tough time since
her kids came to see her some months back.” His breath stuttered, and Lilith’s
stomach twisted with anxiety. “She said she had to see a therapist
after .
 . .” He swallowed hard. “Her kids
have such problems, you know?”

Lilith scoffed but said nothing.

“
And .
 . .” He was looking
down, wringing the edge of her blanket in his hand. “She told me she’d failed
as a parent.”
A beat.
“She said there was nothing
worse than realizing your kid had been hurt, and you didn’t even notice.”

Lilith’s heart skipped, and she gasped. Her mind seized, a finger
of stark white fear sending a jolt of electricity down her spine.

Had they told? Had Dana and Mal told?

“You tried to tell me, didn’t you?” His voice cracked. “You tried
to tell me, and I didn’t believe you.”

In her head, Dana’s seventeen-year-old voice was pleading with
her. “
You can’t tell him, Lilith. You can’t. You can’t
.” Her throat was
closed off, her heart thudding painfully against her broken ribs.

“The things you said about Mr. Harper all those years
ago .
 . . they were true.”

He wasn’t asking.

Tears welled and spilled
over,
tracking
from the corners of her eyes into her hairline, but Lilith was frozen. She
couldn’t move to wipe them away; she couldn’t turn her head to see what her
father’s expression was. She stared up at the ceiling, but she saw nothing. Her
head was spinning.

She was seventeen, and things had been bad at home. She was lying.
A lot.
She couldn’t seem to stop. She would get caught
up in other people’s lives—books, movies, television. She couldn’t stop
reading, couldn’t stop watching, and sometimes—a lot of times—when anyone asked
her a question, she answered as though she was some character and not herself.

Her father didn’t understand. He used to look at her like she was
the brightest star in his universe, but that was so long ago. Now, almost every
time she spoke, he just looked sad and disappointed.

Lilith was frustrated. She was panicked. She needed to get him to
listen because Aiden was about to go into junior high, and if he took Honors
History, like their father wanted him to, he would have Mr. Harper as a
teacher. She couldn’t let it happen. She just couldn’t.